Philip Roth has died at the age of 85. The early days of this site are filled with my reviews and thoughts on many of his books. Indeed, one of my first posts, from July 4, 2008, was on his 1979 novel The Ghost Writer. I read six more of his novels in 2008, and several more in 2009 and 2010. I remember the period well. I was living in South Orange, New Jersey, near the Weequahic neighborhood where Roth grew up and where he set a lot of his fiction.
The last book Roth published was 2010’s Nemesis, and the last time I read any of his novels was early 2011 when I sat down with 1993’s Operation Shylock. While I still have several of his books sitting unread on my shelf, I have been wary over the years as Roth and his work aged and as I changed my own perspectives. Then, in late 2017, I read The Library of America’s final Roth volume, Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960 – 2013. Reading that reminded me of Roth’s verve, his fearlessness, his often uncomfortable explorations of his own life and of American culture. I wrote:
Roth’s critics have their ammunition and I do think some of it is aimed true. However, despite his failings and blindspots, Roth is an author who took long and hard looks in the mirror and at his America and culture and he wasn’t afraid to lay it all out in his fiction.
I would like to revisit some of my favorites. His Nathan Zuckerman books are among my favorite books. I’d like to check out the few I haven’t read, like 2004’s The Plot Against America, which feels more important in 2018.
I hope you’ll feel welcome to share your thoughts on Roth’s work and your experiences reading his books. And if you need any recommendations or wish to read my own thoughts, here is a rundown of his work, with links to the ones I’ve reviewed on The Mookse and the Gripes:
- Goodbye, Columbus (1959)
- Letting Go (1962)
- When She Was Good (1967)
- Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
- Our Gang (1971)
- The Breast (1972)
- The Great American Novel (1973)
- My Life as a Man (1974)
- The Professor of Desire (1977)
- The Ghost Writer (1979)
- Zuckerman Unbound (1981)
- The Anatomy Lesson (1983)
- The Prague Orgy (1985)
- The Counterlife (1986)
- Deception (1990)
- Patrimony (1991)
- Operation Shylock (1993)
- Sabbath’s Theater (1995)
- American Pastoral (1997)
- I Married a Communist (1998)
- The Human Stain (2000)
- The Dying Animal (2001)
- The Plot Against America (2004)
- Everyman (2006)
- Exit Ghost (2007)
- Indignation (2008)
- The Humbling (2009)
- Nemesis (2010)
Oh, no! I am so sorry to hear this. As recently as January 21, 2018, the NYT Book Review featured a front-page piece entitled “Philip Roth Is Still Here”. The last book of Roth’s which I read was the absorbing Everyman (2006). I suppose that at age 85 it cannot be said that Roth was “cheated” but the news is still sad.
Philip Roth apparently didn’t like his first stories very much because there wasn’t much turmoil, anger, violence or obsessive sex to grab and hold on to a reader’s attention. His short story about a young man’s run-in with a Rabbi is a classic on an elder’s gross misuse of appropriated authority. It is in the Goodbye Columbus collection. It is perfectly written and tells how when a thoughtful guy is very young and well-intentioned how all the adults aren’t necessarily on his side or favor either his potential success or survival. I really liked that account of something I had witnessed happening even to really smart people. There is a jewel of a few pages near the end of Sabbath’s Theater about a really old man living in the second floor room of a house on the Jersey Shore. It really captures the situation of being old and hanging on better than anything else I have ever read about that. R.I.P.
Trevor, thank you for posting this. Philip Roth was one of my favorite novelists. I never met Roth, I never heard Roth read or speak, but to me and some of my friends, Roth’s death feels like an oddly personal loss, as if we’ve lost an endlessly fascinating, fiercely intelligent and fabulously well-read, often riotously funny, sometimes outrageous, and always honest older friend.
I’ve read all of Roth’s fiction and reread much of it at least once. My favorite Roth novels span the fifty years of his writing: Goodbye Columbus (including the novella, and the short stories Defender of the Faith and Conversion of the Jews), which nailed class and ethnic resentment among Jews as well as Jewish defensiveness; The Ghost Writer; Patrimony, a highly affecting story of a son’s love for his father; American Pastoral, which on every reading makes me almost viscerally ill with sympathy with the Swede and his worry about his daughter; The Human Stain; The Plot Against America, which perfectly depicted the very real fears of anti-Semitism among American Jews around World War II and which, of course, perfectly translates to today’s American politics; Exit Ghost; Indignation, with a plot that resonates for reasons too personal to recount here; and Nemesis. Even some of my least favorite Roth novels—Our Gang, The Great American Novel, Operation Shylock, The Dying Animal—contain some wonders. I’ve read Roth throughout my adulthood, and I found his fictional musings on the indignities, regrets, and memories of old age especially powerful.
Roth was a famously and almost literally back-breaking worker. Over the years, I’ve listened to some interviews with Roth. One which especially remained with me was Roth speaking of how he prefers to think of some novels as not being to his taste, rather than categorically dismissing them. I attended a small symposium in October 2017 on the recently published collection Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013. The audience seemed to be filled with childhood and later friends, relatives, and literary and academic colleagues. Roth was often generous in his praise of other novelists and he led me to read Zadie Smith, Louise Erdrich, and Edna O’Brien among others with even greater interest.
Thanks for leaving your thoughts above, Seth, Larry and Dan. It’s fun to hear your experiences with his books as well as some of your appreciation for his work/talks/encouragement to read others in general!
An American friend handed his second-hand copy of Portnoy’s Complaint to me in about 1975 and I did not like it very much, did not even finish it, so I just kind of ignored him for a long time. Sometime in the 2000s I could not find anything worth reading in a bookshop in Leuven, close to me here in Belgium. I spied American Pastoral, read the blurb on the back and decided to give it a try (just before that I had read a sterling review by James Wood in the Guardian about a book by Mr Roth and I read an interview with him in a French magazine, where he acquitted himself extremely well) and I enjoyed it immensely, whereupon I began working through all of his books (although I never returned to Portnoy’s Complaint). I read a biography about the author a while back, which was well worth reading. Very entertaining.
Funnily enough, my American friend also handed me a copy of The Diceman, which was also a bit ribald and quite funny. I actually enjoyed it. And the other day, I went to the English section of a local bookshop only to discover The Diceman has been reissued.
Anton
P.S. Yes, Dan, it does feel a bit like a personal loss
I should add that Philip Roth has been a bit like a sountrack to my life, accompanying me, from the time my two children were entering their teens and they are now 34 and 26 respectively.
Anton
Anton wrote: “I should add that Philip Roth has been a bit like a sountrack to my life”
Exactly! Isn’t it interesting to have read and enjoyed Philip Roth for so long that you can track one’s own life events by recalling which novel you were reading at the time? I’ve found with Roth, as well as with other very favorite authors, that how I react to a particular novel depends upon just what was happening in my life when I read it, and that I often react differently when I reread that novel when my life circumstances have changed. When I first read American Pastoral, my daughters were still young and it felt remarkably powerful to me.
Philip Roth could write about anything because he seemed able to observe everyone and be able to synthesize the little stuff into something really extreme or just work out how that person would act when their reactions or feelings were torqued up quite a bit. Relationships can be seen as mind games that people play with one another as in “Goodbye Columbus”. I sort of don’t like reading about how bad nature undermines lasting relationships which turn boring after the sizzle is gone. But it takes real craft to make the sizzle leaving seem so inevitable in a realistic story. About appreciating other writers, “Goodbye Columbus” makes one think of Nick in “The Great Gatsby” and though Fitzgerald escalates, wealth and bad behavior into tragedy, Brenda seems not to have thought much of Neil or considered him much of a loss. But Neil seems somewhat destroyed by the ending of their relationship though it seems like he will move on to other girlfriends, but will he assume that all his relationships will end as his did with Brenda? Reading Roth I may not be happy what he sees in others or what he tells you about them. Eighty-five is a good long life but I wish he could have lived longer as excellent writing makes you anticipate what he might have thought of something else that materialized later on and whether his viewpoint could have changed.
Thanks guys for sharing your personal experiences with Roth – I could really sense your intimate memories!
Also, I hope it’s not unseemly to ask at this point…..where does Philip rank all-time with regard to other deceased American writers? Is he indeed up there with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Nabokov and Updike?…..maybe even at the very top?
(And Sean – I would love getting your opinion!)
A lovely remembrance by Emmanuel Dongala in Le Monde Afrique of what Roth meant to him.
Thanks for pointing this out, Dan!
You’re welcome, Trevor.
The New Yorker’s May 26th “Fiction and More” includes links to articles about Roth by James Wood, Nicole Krauss, Zadie Smith, Bernard Avishal, Alexandra Schwartz, and Louise Erdrich on Roth. My favorite is Erdrich’s remembrance.